OnTrack Reading

Watch your child’s head as he reads. Does he scan print with his eyes, or does his head shift as he reads?

I’ve worked with children who have been through vision therapy and can finally deal with close-up work like reading print. However, some of them retain a bad reading habit in spite of attempts to train efficient tracking skills in vision therapy.

The Problem: A Bad Habit

Although a child will work on building the ability to track efficiently during vision therapy, that doesn’t mean that he will automatically adopt the proper behavior as he reads. Your child might be so used to either bobbing and weaving while reading, or to just tracking with his head moving side to side, that he keeps doing this every time he reads, out of habit.

The result will be choppy reading because it is a far slower process and also can be quite tiring due to the extra energy required just to keep continually moving one’s head back and forth while reading. It is also likely that a child using his head to track will read carelessly. That is, he will either miss the common little words like a and the or he will substitute another word instead due to his having jumped across the word instead of efficiently scanning it with his eyes.

The Cure for the Bad Habit

Sit across from your child at a table as he reads aloud and watch his eyes and head. His head should be steady and unmoving as his eyes move across each line of print. If this is what is happening, great. However, if you see his head moving slowly, or if he’s bobbing around, then tell him what you’re going to do and reach across and put your hand on the top of his head and steady it. Then have him read a few lines of print.

He is likely, after a short period of adaptation, to start reading both more fluently and more accurately, assuming of course that he’s reading material he’s capable of reading. This cure won’t teach phonics, nor will it correct a vision problem. Both the vision issues and the phonics instruction should already have been done, or be well underway.

Anyway, if you do notice that your child’s reading fluency and accuracy shows a marked improvement, then take the time to point that out and see if you can convince him that it’s actually happened. If you can, then you also have a chance of convincing your child to steady his own head when he’s reading alone. But first, he has to feel like it’s really making a difference.

Summary

While some vision therapy exercises are specifically designed to build tracking skill, that doesn’t mean your child will dump his previous habits and begin reading in a more efficient manner. Holding his head, and making clear to him that doing so improves his fluency, is one way to get him to more quickly shift to a new, better, method of scanning print by using his eyes alone, rather than his entire head. However, if your child has poor tracking ability, holding his head might only frustrate him further. This tip is about changing a bad habit, not building tracking skill.

This is the last item in the “Tidbits” portion of the guide. Here are the others:

Telling b from d (A tactile method that works exceptionally well)

The Sounds of the Letter c (The one rule every child should learn)

The Sounds of the Letter g (This one’s more confusing to a child)

When to spell with “k” (A logical outgrowth of the “Rule of c”)

The Digraphs “ar” and “or” (Why ar and or should be taught as digraphs)

The next topic is the Junior High Phonics Course, a series of ten 10-minute lesson plans intended to help older students learn to more efficiently decode unfamiliar multisyllable words.

Next topic: Junior High Phonics Course, or return to the OnTrack Home Page.